“Hey Chris, didn’t that movie come out like forever ago?” Yes, and I have two kids under four, so I finally finished it on my phone at 10:45 last night. This is my life. Plus, no spoiler alert needed, if you haven’t seen it, tough cookies, you’re way behind.
HEY THIS MOVIE’S THEME IS “HAN SOLO” REALLY FLIES BY THE SEAT OF HIS PANTS. Han starts off as a slave and escapes. Han leaves behind a lady when the guards close the gate on her. Han signs up to be a pilot in the Imperial military, but gets stuck in infantry duty. This is where the first sentence begins to be repeated about every three minutes throughout the movie. BTW – still better than Star Wars outside the first three.
After crossing the wrong people, he winds up a prisoner and finds Chewbacca. Now I in. Chewbacca is the best Star Wars character, because his dialogue isn’t written by grown men imagining what 11 year old boys would like to hear in a movie. I must admit, I started getting interested at this point, as the action really increased. Now it’s way better than any of the Star Wars made after 1983.
The train scene was great and had deep consequences, the stakes were raised and it finally showed what happened to get the Millennium Falcon into the story. The rest of the movie went at a pretty good clip for action, but again, the dialogue. Han Solo has to do the “Kessel Run” a very dangerous space journey (and a callback to the originals). It gets name dropped about 19 times at this point into every single conversation, but things are moving fast enough to get past it. WE GET IT – YOU IMPROVISE AND KESSEL RUN AND MAYBE SOMETIMES YOU IMPROVISE MORE. The ending got more involved and there was a hook for a sequel tossed in there.
Overall, I enjoyed it and it was about 300% better than any of the newer Star Wars films and about 500% better than the batch from 20 years ago – looking at you, Phantom Menace, yuck. Action – 8/10. Tie ins to Star Wars base films – 7/10, one more Kessel Run reference and I don’t think I would have made it. Acting – considering how they wrote the script, 7/10. Dialogue – 2/10. I would have went lower if they just grunted “I can fly that” and picked bugs off each other’s backs, because that’s how deep they wrote Han Solo.